Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Doctor Sam Beckett led an elite group of scientists into the desert to develop a top secret project, known as QUANTUM LEAP. Pressured to prove his theories or lose funding, Doctor Beckett, prematurely stepped into the Project Accelerator and vanished. He awoke to find himself in the past, suffering from partial amnesia and facing a mirror image that was not his own. Fortunately, contact with his own time was made through brainwave transmissions, with Al, the Project Observer, who appeared in the form of a hologram that only Doctor Beckett could see and hear. Trapped in the past, Doctor Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life, putting things right, that once went wrong and hoping each time, that his next leap will be the leap home.

For nearly all science fiction fans, Quantum Leap is on the shortlist of the best genre TV shows. With a perfect balance of humor and drama, the show became a cult classic, ranking #15 in TV Guide’s list of the 25 Top Cult Shows Ever, and ‘Sam Beckett’ was ranked #12 in their list of the 25 Greatest Sci-Fi Legends.

Quantum Leap: The Complete Second Season, scheduled for release on the 14th, makes a great gift for the holidays. The 22 episode season is split over 3 discs, with great picture and sound quality. Preorder it at Amazon.com, for $41.99 If you’re still not convinced, just watch the trailers: Small – Medium – Large

it at Amazon.com, for $41.99 If you’re still not convinced, just watch the trailers:

John D’Amico’s review of Matrix Revolutions proves that great ancestry does not guarantee box office success or even a good movie.

The Matrix franchise implodes

The Matrix Revolutions starts out where Reloadedleft off. Neo is in a coma and Zion is about to be destroyed. As it turns out, Neo is in some sort of purgatory train depot ruled by a scraggly program known as the Trainman (Bruce Spence, the Gyro Captain from the Mad Max franchise himself). Morpheus, Trinity, and Seraph rescue him from there by threatening to shoot Mervavingian, but not before Spence sucker punches Neo. From there, it gets kind of unclear.This movie is so problematic, so overdone, and so poorly conceived it boggles the mind to think that it was conceived by the same people who gave us the first flick, The Matrix. Oh, there have been awful sequels before – just look at Jaws: The Revenge and Superman 3-4- but those movies came from different writers and directors than their predecessors. The Wachowski brothers have no one to blame for this monstrosity but themselves.The main problem is that everything is overdone to the point of absurdity. For example, the army of Agent Smiths — one (i.e. a single) Hugo Weaving is menacing, one thousand is cartoonish; especially when only one does anything. In fact, the entire movie is as redundant as the Smiths. Most of the dialogue (especially the Oracle’s), is metaphysical hogwash that goes around and around aimlessly. The importance of the Morpheus character to the story-line was apparently lost on the Wachowski brothers who, in this outing, chose to give him lines like “he fights for us”, and techno-speak while he co-pilots a ship driven by his “ex”. This is a far cry from the “great” Morpheus, who explained it all in the first flick with lines like, “the Matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth”.The action is a letdown also. The climactic brawl that the entire series culminates in consists of only Neo and Agent Smith flying around like “Powerpuff Girls” punching each other for about ten minutes in a rain-soaked and, for some inexplicable reason, green city. Meanwhile, the Zion Army shoots Sentinels in Aliens “Powerloader” rip-offs (Ripley helps to “save the dock” above — just kidding — Ripley wouldn’t dirty her hands on this trash). Why anyone would think that using slow, unprotected metal suits as counters for agile flying squids is a good idea, we do not know. Why Neo can get punched out by the Gyro Captain, yet still believe he can face a thousand Agent Smiths, we also do not know. What happened to the twins? Just how did the Oracle say anything of significance? How do the Architect (or is he Colonel Sanders?) and the Keymaker fit into all of this?There’s a lot this movie doesn’t explain. To its credit, though, it does have a way of making you not care. Find a more productive way to spend two hours, like smashing your head against a brick wall.

After watching the mini-series back in December there was no doubt in our minds that Battlestar Galactica would be born again on the Sci Fi Channel. In our opinion it was far and away the best new television SciFi treatment since Star Trek The Next Generation (really the only decent incarnation since TOS).